All images by Alessandro Corsini. Used with permission.

My name is Alessandro Corsini. I’m an Italian artist, photographer, and media professional based in Berlin (Germany) for over a decade. Despite having started with photography pretty early, the journey to fine art photography has been long. My academic, professional, and artistic background is a trajectory from a commercial to a scientific and then to an artistic approach to media. During this trajectory, I worked with different media: video, photography, interactive media, and experimental languages at their intersection.

I could classify my art photography as abstract, street, or portrait photography. But the conceptual space I inhabit is one that is eclectic, open to influences, genre-defiant, and in constant transformation. And in this liminal space, synthesis, not analysis, rules.

As an artist, I’m interested in both concept and form. But in dealing with these, I consider media and genres only means to an end.

I started learning black and white film photography, development, and printing techniques during my middle school years in Rockville (MD, USA). But being my father, a portrait photography enthusiast, photography has actually been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. During high school and university, I would occasionally skip lessons with my Minolta film camera to document historical, medieval costume parades, take portraits of my mates at the seaside, experiment with backlighting or with light-painting, in an improvised dark room, with my girlfriend as a model.

My last ten years have been enormously important in refining my visual culture, my aesthetic sensibility, and, most of all, my vision. Differently than most people think, the technique is not the most time-consuming – or hardest – aspect of photography to learn. And it’s also not what actually sets apart the wannabes from the real photographers. The “eye,” the aesthetic sensibility, the feel for photography is that decisive aspect. No books exist on how to make beautiful pictures. Books may contain a set of general rules to make a photo correct from a technical perspective, but the concept of “beautiful” is a totally subjective one. So being a professional photographer requires, in order to make the right aesthetic choices, having a concept of what is generally regarded as “beautiful” by society, by your audience, or by your customers. Being an artist instead means having a peculiar, unique vision independently from what is commonly regarded as “beautiful.”

Coming from the commercial world of advertising, my artistic vision can be considered a synthesis between these two.

Photography is another way for me to let my subconscious express itself. Most of the time, I’m not even aware of why I’m attracted by a certain photographic subject and not something else or why I like certain pictures of mine and not others. I usually only understand years later what I was expressing with a particular photo. It’s like my subconscious talking to my future self about my past self.

At the very moment of shooting, it’s all about chasing the beauty in the viewfinder in a totally intuitive, instinctive, and immersive way. Later, when selecting and editing the photos, there is more time for detachment and rationality but, at the end of the day, it’s still your aesthetic sensibility making the choices.

Whereas photographers from the first decades of the century like Man Ray and Bill Brandt are fascinating for their vanguardist and experimental strength, the photographer I probably feel aesthetically more inspired by, as a fine-art and street-photographer, is Fan Ho. His use of the human shadow as a formal element, the geometries in the composition, the tonal contrasts, his precision are simply unrivaled. I think his influence on our modern visual culture is still enormously underestimated.

Despite starting with film photography, I’m actually a digital guy (I also hold a master’s in digital media). I embraced th...